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Category Archives: Our Correspondents

There is a pawnshop in Danbury, Connecticut, that I frequent. Like most pawnshops, it is at once depressing and intriguing. I often check out pawnshops out of a foolhardy belief that I will find treasure. I used to scour flea markets with that same optimism, certain I would find a genuine Tiffany lamp amongst the macramé owls and tube socks. The lamp would be five dollars because the seller had no idea what it was really worth.

Of course eBay, Storage Wars, and Antique Roadshow have quashed my dreams. Now everyone knows the exact market value of what they own; you can spend a lifetime going to consignment stores, estate sales, and pawnshops and never find anything that anyone would consider a “treasure”—unless, of course, you have a strange unshared addiction to slightly beaten up Barbie Dreamhouses.

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In Danbury, Connecticut, off Interstate 84, there is an overpass festooned with graffiti scribbles. They have been there for three decades. No one has thought to erase them and, as far as I can tell, no one has added to them.

The graffiti is of the basest kind. There is little attempt at artwork, design, or display. It is simply the names of yesterday’s rock-and-roll bands spray painted in black in adolescent calligraphy: the Who, Kiss, Commander Cody, Mountain.

I drive under this overpass at least once a week. This is the route to all the big-box stores, supermarkets, and a dozen places that sell cheap cell-phone plans. Exit 7 is not the autumn-leaf splashed Connecticut seen on calendars. It is where you go to load up on paper towels and laundry detergent.

Decades ago, when I first pondered these scrawled names, the graffiti made me mad: here was more ugliness defacing an already sad stretch of road. Read More

A few words about this presentation. The verbal part had a romantic beginning. I was obsessing over the rhythms of Korney Chukovsky’s poem “Telephone.” Suddenly—very suddenly—occurred to me the first rhymes of what I thought might be an existential masterpiece: “Long time ago there was … a fuzz.” Note the Russian accent. A great deal more came to me all at once. I was in the car. I felt frightened. I thought I might forget. So I uncapped a marker and wrote what I could on a box that was conveniently in the passenger seat. This is a true story. I kept writing more at stop lights, all the way to Chipotle. More came out on napkins there, but that stuff was trash and I cut it. Time I got to my office at school, I had “The Fuzz” that you see below, intact. And I was in a sweat to share it with the world. Over the next few days, I developed illustrations. These had no merit, but I sent ’em to people anyway. People all over the world: little kids, infirm persons. Part two of this story is where I turned to a real illustrator. I know her slightly. She is one of the good ones in Chicago. I had just read her graphic novel, Chronicles of Fortune, in transports of delight, on an airplane. I doubted she would be able to find time to do pictures for “The Fuzz,” as she was six or seven months pregnant and had plenty of other things to do, but voilà, she found the time. I should like to direct your attention to the panel where nobody knows why there was a fuzz. That image is a good meme. The whole thing is memes, all the way down. What else shall I tell you? I plan on writing another piece like “The Fuzz,” called “The Slime” (“Once upon a time … was a slime”). ’Til then, wishing everybody a happy 2018.

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It appears a great deal is already known about the Grinch. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, did some graduate work at Oxford, left school to establish his Zarathustra’s eyrie on Mount Crumpit in Canada—and was fifty-three years old at the time of his conversion to Christianity. I should say his putative conversion.

The book documenting this most famous episode of his life is called How the Grinch Stole Christmas!—not The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. It doesn’t matter; Google knows what you meant. The television cartoon, upon which so many people in my generation have based their personalities, aired for the first time in December 1966. Boris Karloff, who did the voice of the Grinch, was nearly eighty at the time. He had less than two years to live. Read More

Our teacher (young, malevolent, witty) was holding forth about the “curlicues and inefficiency” of Derek Walcott’s poetic style. Our teacher said, “It’s like he wants to go to the kitchen to get a banana. So, he dresses up like Henry James, striped pants, fresh pressed—tails, top hat—and stands with supreme dignity on the curb next to his bed. A Rolls-Royce pulls up silently. It is dazzling, five hundred pounds of chrome front and back, and a chauffeur jumps out—white gloves—opens the passenger door for Walcott. Walcott glides into the seat, frowning deeply and nodding toward the kitchen. He is now sitting bolt upright. The chauffeur closes the door, takes his own place, and drives six feet to the kitchen. He hops out, assists Walcott toward the kitchen counter, where the bananas—somber yellow with coffee-colored freckles—are situated in an animated rhombus of light, rain seeded, coming from the kitchen window. At which point we are doomed. Those bananas will turn to baby food before Walcott is finished describing them … ” We all laughed, but one of the students said, “Yes, but doesn’t that description apply to the first three quarters of the Norton Anthology—?”

Comment. It does if you think Shakespeare and all those people were just describing bananas. The real question isn’t whether the description applies to the Norton; it’s whether it applies to Walcott. And here is an aphorism: Every laugh—deflects.

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The piece below was originally published on February 8, 2014, on Anthony Opal’s old website, the Weekly (since kaput). In reprinting it, we have only changed the very end of the “Afterword,” so that now you can simply click on a hyperlink to access additional (and extremely precious) information.

In early 1872, Edward Lear left a poem unfinished. It was very nearly complete: all it lacked of its intended five rhyming subsections were two lines and two words (not at the end). Lear left blanks in the manuscript, and it’s clear he intended to supply the missing bits at some later time. No one knows why he never did so.

The piece is called “The Scroobious Pip,” and it is good. It’s right up there with the best material Lear included in Laughable Lyrics, which came out roughly five years later (December 1876). But, because he never finished it, it remained unpublished during his lifetime. Indeed, the piece first saw the light of day in 1935, in the back of what was essentially a small collectors’ edition—950 copies, each one numbered. (My copy is #237.)

In 1954, Harvard University Press published a thin (sixty-four-page) book called Teapots and Quails, a very valuable document for Lear enthusiasts insofar as it made many previously uncollected or very hard-to-get pieces available—including ten limericks with accompanying illustrations. “The Scroobious Pip” appears on pages 60 through 62. The lacunæ in the manuscript are rendered either as blanks or as strings of dots. Read More